Everyone has their top ten list of movies floating around in the back of their heads somewhere. Obviously it changes and evolves as new movies come out and it's always difficult to narrow down to a single favourite, but everyone has that list. Similarly, most people have a top ten horrible movies that made them want to disembowel everyone involved with the production and place their heads on spikes under the Hollywood sign as a warning to the others. OK maybe not that extreme, but certainly a bottom ten, if you will.
It's a ragged little dog fight at the bottom of that pile for me. Grimsby (or The Brothers Grimsby as it is now baffling titled) is definitely down there, as are a number of big budget crap-fests like Pearl Harbour and written-specifically-to-impress-the-Academy Oscar fodder shit shows like Million Dollar Baby. It's incredibly difficult to pick, particularly through my impermeable veil of vitriol, but if you break it down by category, there is a clear winner/loser in the realm of Scientifical Fictions. Skyline.
Skyline is an absolute abortion of a movie, saved partially only by some half decent SFX. This should come as no small surprise seeing as the directors were involved in the Matrix, but even as a sophomore movie (their directorial debut was the risible Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem which comes a close second on the list of dumbest Sci Fi movies ever), you might have thought they'd pay at least some attention to actually telling a story in an interesting, engaging or at very least diverting fashion. Sadly, it seems that this concept was completely lost on the Brothers Strause who instead chose to waste well over an hour on effectively an extended preamble only to have the most exciting stuff happen as an animated afterthought under the end credits. I shit you not; we spend a good 90 minutes following a bunch of cretins around an apartment complex as they try to avoid aliens from the Dyson dimension hoovering them into the sky or swallowing them into their Squidward 2099 cosplay suits, only to see none of them manage any sort of daring escape whatsoever and them all having their brains inserted into alien drones. Roll credits, under which one of the aforementioned douchebags manages to retain his humanity, take control of his bargain basement Guyver cosplay suit and start doing something other than his previous default setting of looking greasy and feckless. It's fascinating; roughly 5 minutes of CGI alien bashing is more fun than the preceding hour and a half of drudgery. It truly is astoundingly bad.
You will be surprised perhaps, as I was, to hear that nearly a decade later, a sequel has emerged. You will likely be more surprised, as I was, to hear it has been recieved favourably amongst critics. You will achieve yet a third level of surprise to read the following: it's actually quite good. If you've been expressing your surprise via the medium of gasping, you may want to take a few moments to regularise your breathing. Still with us? Excellent.
Beyond Skyline might not be the most inventive title for a sequel ever, but I feel like the director may have psychic abilities because they've taken everything I thought was wrong with the original and fixed it. The build up is snappy; Space Hoovers arrive, weird lights are established as a bad thing to look directly into, our group of flawed heroes is introduced and away we go. OK, so there may be a fairly strong reliance on stereotype here; drunk cop on administrative leave, wayward son of the drunk cop on administrative leave, understanding but put-upon police partner of drunk cop, blind homeless veteran not specifically related to drunk cop, subway train driver (who actually doesn't end up being a romantic interest or damsel to much although she does spend a lot of time literally carrying the baby), and then later on we get the smackhead hippie scientist, South East Asian martial artist freedom fighter and tough-as-nails military leader from a civilian background. You heard all of that correctly. The pacing remains frantic throughout, with people getting squished in cave-ins, sucked into space craft and exploded by land mines. The result is utter chaos but in a barely controlled sense; we're in New York police station, then we're in the subway, then we're on the alien ship and now we're in Laos and not for a moment do you stop and think "wait, what?". It's nonsensical to such an extent that it becomes perfectly reasonable and you just accept that a grizzled functioning alcoholic cop would befriend a converted alien warrior and instantly be able to use alien tech grafted to his arm like an expertly trained melee fighter. It makes perfect sense that the Laotion resistance fighters would suspect the clearly Caucasian policeman of being in league with the local rogue law enforcement but trust him enough to take him to their hidden base, on the grounds that a short burst of well choreographed face punching is an excellent way to establish both character and socio-political allegiance.
It gets nuttier and nuttier as it goes along and is all the better for it. None of this so called tense character driven suspense malarky; let's pull the arm off this guy and have him keep fighting the aliens with just a machete because that seems like fun. Let's have an alien hybrid baby who matures at an exponential rate and becomes the key to not only victory, but grows up (this increased growth rate thing is inconsistent at best, but probably better to not dwell on that) to lead Earthlings on a counter offensive into the deepest reaches of space with her alien warrior/human revenant pseudo boyfriend. Why not go the whole hog and have the climactic end fight between two giant alien combat suits in an ancient temple? Why not indeed. Absolute, unadulterated, glorious chaos.
Full disclosure: Beyond Skyline is not going to get into my top ten greatest films but it certainly isn't going into the bottom ten either. Yes, it borrows really heavily from other movies, chief among them Independence Day, Pacific Rim, Terminator and even Prometheus of all things, but what it does do spectacularly well though is be the polar opposite of its predecessor: exciting, action packed and a ton of big dumb fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment